But then there is a crossgrade price for the purchased Kontakt 5 edition for $249 See It says 'Only for registered users of qualifying 3rd party products that run in KONTAKT PLAYER. See The free Kontakt 5 player seems to play only libraries that are purchased from NI whereas the purchased Kintakt 5 edition plays 'unlicensed libraries'. I was thinking that might be an alternative that would run more reliably under Sonar. Are there any options other than Aria for using these sounds in Sonar? Anybody have experience with First Call Horns? That is $199 and the samples sound good. I know the earlier Garritan packages used Kontact. I know there are some amazing horn libraries out there, but I don't want to spend $2000 when the Garritan sounds are good enough for my projects. I finally just gave in and boosted the gain through a compressor. I have been through every possible parameter I can think of and couldn't resolve that. It does other goofy things like making certain instruments 1/10th the sound level of the others.

And now when I try to reload my template of sounds, I might have to do that three times before the right instruments are actually loaded into Aria. More frequent cases where the Aria tracks go silent. Today I updated to the latest Aria engine (as it doesn't appear there has been an update to the Aria 'Player' itself for several years). In the past, I was usually able to rectify this by reloading all the instruments into Aria. I can be working along editing MIDI and suddenly the Aria tracks stop sounding while all the other synths in the project keep working. I can't pick up any pattern that triggers this problem.

It works, but keeps going silent on all 16 tracks. But when I try to use Aria under Sonar, it ain't so great. The sounds are good enough for what I'm doing, and the Aria player seems to be stable under Finale.

I have the Garritan Jazz & Big Band 3 library. Is there an alternative to Aria for the Garritan libraries?

Garritan jazz and big band